Why Personal Development Should Focus More On Human Relationships

There’s a mountain of personal development literature out there about improving the material circumstances of your life, mostly by making more money and becoming more productive. A topic that gets less coverage, however, is what we’re supposed to do with all the extra money and time these books, articles and workshops promise us.

Money and time, of course, aren’t valuable unless we have inspiring ideas about what to do with them. If you received $1 million tomorrow, for example, but you weren’t allowed to spend it on anything, it would be worthless to you. If you could add an extra hour to your day by eliminating procrastination, but you had no compelling vision of what to do with that hour, it wouldn’t be very useful. As Martin Hawes and Joan Baker write in Get Rich, Stay Rich, “to set out to make a lot of money for its own sake, without a bigger goal, is to doom yourself to a life of disappointment.” Nonetheless, many of us treat acquiring more money and time as the principal goals of our journey toward personal growth.

Some suggest that, beyond sheer survival, our quest for money and time is about being able to do more, and spend more time with, our loved ones and friends. For example, with more money and productivity, perhaps we could afford, and have the time, to take the family to a foreign country for a week. I think this answer is close to the truth, but doesn’t quite hit the mark. Merely spending more time with our loved ones—even if we do it in more expensive and exotic locales—doesn’t guarantee we’ll enjoy that time together. If relations between us are tense or uncomfortable, we may end up wishing we were back in the office.
Read the Rest of This Article »